Robert Mapplethorpe - Rose

Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?
By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

In your beauty, you rival even the beauty of Nature. You are immortal, your beauty shall never fade. Your beauty is Immortality. The greatest writer of all time marvels and sings an ode to your fairness.